The Bay of Silence Movie Storyline. Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko) and Will (Claes Bang) live an enviable life in London. She’s a celebrated artist, he is a dependable engineer, willing stepfather to her twin eight-year old daughters. When the difficult birth of their son, Amadeo, rocks Rosalind’s carefully calibrated world, she abruptly disappears with her children and the young nanny, Candy (Shalisha James Davis). Will suspects a link to a recently arrived suitcase from France, filled with faded photographic negatives.
He launches a frantic search across Europe, locating the‘ at the’cliff top Normandy home of Rosalind’s dead photographer uncle (J.B. Raven). But relief turns to horror when he discovers his son has mysteriously died. Hiding in the dilapidated house, Rosalind is too traumatized Wo recognize him, the twins speak in riddles and Candy has disappeared. A desperate Will sees two options. Report the tragedy and risk his wife being accused of murder or cover it up and protect his family.
Unable to believe his wife is culpable, Will secretly buries Amadeo in the dead of night, and flees France with his family to a Swiss mountain clinic to help Rosalind recover. When Will confides in her mother, Vivian, (Alice Krige) she confesses Rosalind’s mental instability links to being raped at fourteen. Will reluctantly agrees to a car accident ‘cover story’, orchestrated by her powerful art dealer stepfather, Milton (Brian Cox), in order to protect Rosalind.
Rosalind returns home but it’s Will who can’t return to ‘normal.’ roaming London, secretly investigating the mystery of his wife’s past, til his obsession and grief drives the vulnerable Rosalind to take refuge with Milton. In a race against time, Will finds the missing Candy. who helps him piece together what happened the night his son died and uncovers the identity of the mysterious Pierre Laurent (Assaad Bouab), who holds the key to Rosalind’s secrets. When an unarmed Will faces a vengeful Milton, it is Rosalind, in a dramatic twist who decides Milton’s fate. Finally, they return to the Bay of Silence in Liguria, Italy, where their story began, the learn if love can conquer all.
The Bay of Silence is a 2020 internationally co-produced thriller film directed by Paula van der Oest from a screenplay by Caroline Goodall, based on the novel of the same name by Lisa St Aubin de Terán. It stars Claes Bang, Olga Kurylenko, Alice Krige, Assaad Bouab and Brian Cox.
In April 2018, it was announced Claes Bang, Olga Kurylenko and Brian Cox had joined the cast of the film, with Paula van der Oest directing from a screenplay by Caroline Goodall, based upon the novel of the same name by Lisa St Aubin de Terán. Principal photography began in July 2018.
In February 2020, Vertical Entertainment acquired distribution rights to the film in the United States, and Signature Entertainment in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The film was released on 14 August 2020 through virtual cinemas and VOD in the United States and Canada, and it also opened in select American cinemas. It will be released on DVD and digital download in the United Kingdom on 28 September 2020.
Film Review for The Bay of Silence
Claes Bang, Olga Kurylenko and Brian Cox star in this mystery thriller about a man who learns startling truths about his wife after the birth of their son, when trauma from her youth resurfaces.
Dutch director Paula van der Oest, whose 2001 rom-com Zus & Zo was nominated for what was then called the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, has gone on in the two decades since to carve out a respectable career with well-received thrillers and romantic dramas. She brings unsurprising polished professionalism to the English-language mystery The Bay of Silence, even if it lacks the Hitchcockian command that might have given this story about the malignant power of buried trauma a more suspenseful edge. Still, the actors are a pleasure to watch and the European locations add atmosphere, making for solid enough adult entertainment that plays just fine on a home screen.
Actress Caroline Goodall transitions into the double role of screenwriter and producer on the adaptation of British author Lisa St. Aubin de Teran’s 1986 novel. It opens with a black and white prologue in which a panicked teenage girl stashes a camera case in a cave on a rocky shoreline and then bolts, screaming hysterically when a guy around the same age reaches out to calm her. The contents of the case and the dark episode of what happened in the coastal house high on a cliff above the beach are the secrets that drive the plot.
The main action starts in Liguria, Italy, at the idyllic inlet that gives the film its title. Will (Claes Bang), who works with a design firm, and Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko), a photographer, are a couple at the height of their passion. This is conveyed with prurient insistence as they joke about having impure thoughts in a church confessional, salivate over the sexual imagery of a plate of mussels and indulge in some al fresco shagging against a rock in the afternoon sun. Ah, the Continent! Only Rosalind’s rattled overreaction when Will scares her by disappearing underwater during a swim hints at her problems, though that impression fades when he asks her to marry him.
Eight months later, Will is carrying her across the threshold of their new home in the affluent London suburbs. She’s heavily pregnant and while he’s playing in the backyard with her 8-year-old twin daughters from a previous relationship (Lilibet and Litiana Biutanaseva), she falls from a broken balcony and is rushed to hospital. The baby, a boy named Amedeo, is saved, but Rosalind is deeply shaken, convinced she had twins again and that the death of one of them is being concealed from her.
Although Rosalind’s stability remains in question six months later, she goes back to work in her home studio creating large-scale photographs that look like Francis Bacon X-rays. But when Will returns from a business trip, Ros, the children and their nanny Candy (Shalisha James-Davis) have all vanished.
Through a case delivered by courier, Will finds disturbing clues that lead him to a house on the Normandy coast, where a tragedy reveals the alarming extent of Rosalind’s fragility. He also discovers how little he knew of his wife’s past, as her mother Vivian (Alice Krige) cagily surrenders details while her former stepfather, Milton (Brian Cox), an upmarket gallerist who also handles Rosalind’s work, is more evasive. “It’s a tight-knit, self-preserving little community at the top,” he tells Will, reminding him he’s an outsider in their posh circle of artists.
It might be pushing it to say Goodall, based on her work here, has a future as a writer of sophisticated thrillers; even at a brisk 93 minutes, the material needs to be tauter. But her script gets the job done by seeding dread early on and nourishing it as fragments of the past come to light exposing the true cause of Rosalind’s mental illness. The damage from childhood sexual trauma that steadily emerges is woven around her summers spent at the home of a famed photographer, now dead, who remains Milton’s highest earner.
A number of plot elements possibly had more weight in the novel but here play like insubstantial distractions, like Will’s pursuit of information from Becca (Hannah van der Westhuysen), a friend of Candy’s who works as a table dancer at a men’s club. Rosalind’s fixation on twins amounts to nothing, and the resemblance of her photography to ultrasound scans seems to point to maternity issues that are false leads. The conspicuous info drop of Milton’s antique firearm collection is an obvious tipoff to how the final faceoff will unfold, and the identity of the villain hiding in plain sight also is telegraphed too early.
There nonetheless are enough elements to keep you watching, not least among them DP Guido van Gennep’s sleek widescreen visuals, with gothic-looking Scottish coastal locations standing in for Normandy in the noirish midsection.
Mostly, however, it’s the actors who keep things compelling even when the plotting gets untidy. Cox, riding high from his Succession boost, brings glinting malevolence to an aesthete accustomed to the ownership that wealth and influence provide. Kurylenko packs plenty of raw feeling into her broken character, and Bang, the Danish breakout star of Ruben Östlund’s The Square, offsets the suave air of an old-school European matinee idol with the gnawing fears of a man desperate to save his family. Even in a small role, it’s lovely to see Krige, her brittle beauty summoning reminders of her dual role in 1981’s Ghost Story, echoes that are not entirely inappropriate here.
The Bay of Silence (2020)
Directed by: Paula van der Oest
Starring: Claes Bang, Olga Kurylenko, Alice Krige, Assaad Bouab, Brian Cox, Caroline Goodall, Litiana Biutanaseva, Shalisha James-Davis, Lilibet Biutanaseva, Hannah van der Westhuysen, Kirsten Davies
Screenplay by: Caroline Goodall
Production Design by: Harry Ammerlaan
Cinematography by: Guido van Gennep
Film Editing by: Paul Tothill, Sander Vos
Costume Design by: Celia Yau
Set Decoration by: Sarah Mursal
Music by: John Swihart
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Vertical Entertainment
Release Date: August 14, 2020 (United States), September 28, 2020 (United Kingdom)
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